Accounting Visibility: How Accounting-Based Controls Become Consequential in Hotel Operations

Abstract

This study examines how accounting-based controls become consequential in hotel operations by explaining how their enabling and constraining effects emerge through accounting visibility and its situated enactment. An interpretive qualitative multiple-case study was conducted across six hotels in Indonesia, involving 25 participants across finance and operational functions. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, supplemented by organizational documents and observations, and analyzed through an abductive interpretive process following the principles of the Gioia methodology. The findings show that accounting-based control arrangements generate accounting visibility by making operational conditions, resource use, performance outcomes, and deviations available for organizational attention. However, visibility does not produce effects automatically. Organizational actors interpret accounting representations in relation to operational circumstances, negotiate their meaning through explanation and justification, and use interpretive space to respond to visible conditions. Accounting visibility can therefore support operational coordination, shared understanding, and contextual adaptation while simultaneously increasing evaluation exposure, accountability pressure, and defensive or delayed responses. The same accounting visibility can thus generate enabling and constraining effects within similar control arrangements. The study conceptualizes accounting visibility as the mechanism through which formal accounting-based controls become consequential, showing that control effects emerge not primarily from formal design but from how organizational actors interpret, negotiate, and mobilize what accounting makes visible. This mechanism is particularly salient in hospitality, where operational uncertainty, cross-functional interdependence, and immediate service demands make accounting visibility dependent on contextual interpretation and negotiated response.